Project Theme 3: Religions Community Perceptions and Responses to Illness

Project Question: How do particular religious traditions influence the interpretation and experience of illness and dying?

Project Description: This project seeks to explore how particular religious and moral communities formulate their beliefs and practices toward health, illness, and dying. Study topics include identifying the resources within a particular spiritual tradition that provide positive support and transformation when facing life-threatening illness and potential misunderstanding among religious communities over the goals and limits of medicine. The project also examines how virtue is characterized by religious communities in illness and in dying (e.g. “the good death”) with special interest in shared commonalities and differences influenced by cultural assumptions. Finally, we seek to create a constructive conversation on how normative theological and moral claims embedded within particular religious communities manifests itself among patients and medical professionals affiliated with a particular tradition as they receive or provide care within secular, pluralistic medical settings.